The Underground Man (17 page)

The Reverend himself opened the door to me looking somewhat muddled and badly organized; shirt and waistcoat were all asunder, as if his seams had finally given out. His neck and cheeks were covered with shaving soap and he clutched a razor, rather menacingly, in one hand. As he stood there blinking at me a bead of blood slowly seeped into the soap.

‘You have cut yourself, Reverend,' I told him.

There was another moment or two's squinting, before his face gave way to a smile.

‘Your Grace,' he said. ‘I am not used to such early callers.' Then, ‘Come in, come in, come in.'

I was led into a parlour-cum-study where he turned and squinted at me again. Mellor is a solid, plump sort of fellow who, by some freak of nature, has only a young lad's legs to
support his considerable weight, which jut out from under him at acute angles like the legs on a milkmaid's stool. His tiny feet had on a pair of Oriental slippers and were positioned ‘ten-to-two' on the rug, as if they were about to launch him into some great balletic leap.

‘I must apologize for not recognizing you, Your Grace,' he said, ‘but I am without my spectacles.'

He leaned towards me and squinted at full strength, as if assessing what the situation required.

‘Cup of tea?' he said, raising his eyebrows.

‘A cup of tea would be just the thing,' I replied.

He smiled and nodded towards the hearth. ‘Kettle's on,' he said.

Then he waved his razor in the air again. ‘Now, if you don't mind, I must complete my ablutions,' and he skipped off up the stairs, leaving me to make myself at home.

Finding a path through the room was no easy matter, for it was packed with so much clutter and stuff. Bookshelves heaved on almost every inch of wall and framed watercolours and sketches and yellowing prints all jostled for the remaining space. There must have been close to a dozen tables, all different sizes, scattered around the room, each one piled with papers and boxes and stacks of threadbare books. Half-naked statuettes thrust their swords into the air and some teetering vase or fancy lamp jangled with my every step. Even the narrow window sills were crowded with glass ornaments and the sunlight took their pinks and turquoises and sent them shimmering on the floor.

I advanced carefully through this jungle of bric-à-brac, nervous of catching some table corner or protruding text and bringing about some dreadful calamity. But at last the fireplace swung into view and I found myself in a clearing before a sagging mantelpiece with a pair of armchairs standing by and so I set about removing my coats. A fresh fire was settling
into the day's business and I don't mind admitting I felt a twinge of jealousy for the master of such a hearty little room.

I was idly picking over the shelves of books when the Reverend reappeared. He was now all brushed-down and buttoned-up and his eyes swam happily in his spectacles. As he nodded, gently priming himself for speech, it occurred to me that he had about him not a fraction of Ignatius Peak's zeal. The Reverend Mellor, I decided, keeps his God very much under his hat.

‘Now, Your Grace,' he said, eyeing me closely, ‘I assume you have had your breakfast?'

When I told him that, in fact, I had not his eyes grew very wide indeed, almost filling his spectacle lenses. A small, incredulous smile played upon his lips.

‘Your Grace, I believe you have run away from home,' he said.

Counselling the bereaved and distraught members of his parish has clearly made him an expert in getting quickly to the bottom of things.

‘I needed to get out of the house for a while,' I told him and added, ‘I left a note for Clement.'

‘Well, in that case, he shall not be worrying. Tell me, would you like me to toast your muffin or would you care to toast your own?'

And we soon were leaning forward on our armchairs like boys around a campfire, each holding out a toasting-fork with a muffin skewered to the end. The Reverend brewed up a pot of smoky-flavoured tea and opened a new jar of quince jelly (a gift, I assumed, from some grateful parishioner). The muffins and the tea were excellent and, finding no good reason to call the proceedings to a halt, we continued to stuff ourselves for getting on an hour until at last the sheer volume of bread and tea inside us forced us to sit back in our chairs. As we rested I felt about as round and breathless as Mellor
himself and wondered if it wasn't perhaps muffins and quince jelly which had given him his distinctive shape. Sitting side by side I thought the two of us must look like a pair of Toby jugs.

The Reverend said how sorry he was that I had missed the Snows' funeral service and I assured him that there was no man sorrier than myself. I thanked him for his recipe for his rheumatism pills and he asked if they had done me any good.

‘In all honesty, I don't think so,' I told him.

He nodded. ‘It was the same with me,' he replied.

We were still meditating on this when, quite suddenly, Mellor sat up in his chair, made a weird, muted exclamation and pressed a forefinger to the side of his head. He leapt to his feet and with admirable alacrity picked his way between the heaped tables and dangling plants, reached a bank of drawers, drew a couple of them straight out from their cases and returned with one under each arm and a large magnifying glass clenched in his teeth.

He rolled back into his armchair with the drawers in his lap. His head disappeared into them. There was the sound of much scuffling and rattling about. When he re-emerged he looked much invigorated and held up a curious looking object which he passed to me, saying,

‘What do you make of that, Your Grace?'

Well, it was flat and fairly heavy – about eight inches by four. White and smooth, like something which had been washed up on a beach.

‘Is it a bone?' I asked.

‘Full marks,' announced Mellor. ‘Now, Your Grace, any idea what beast?'

I must have stared at that cold old bone for getting on a minute, as if it might whisper me a clue, but at last I was forced to admit that I was completely in the dark.

‘It is the jawbone …' said the Reverend, with eyes widening, ‘of a hyena. And a big fellow he was, too.'

He held both hands out in front of him, a foot apart.

‘Head about so big,' he assured me, raising his eyebrows. Then he gazed down at the space between his hands, so utterly engrossed in his hyena-thoughts that I feared he might suddenly throw back his head and let out a terrible howl.

‘Found just over a year ago, in your own caves up at Creswell.'

‘Well, well,' I said, noting how he had got me nodding along with him.

Another fragment of bone was tossed over to me, about the same size as the razor Mellor had been waving about. I turned the thing over in my hands. It was considerably lighter than the previous one and smelt, I thought, vaguely of mutton.

‘Take a closer look,' said the Reverend, handing me the magnifying glass. So I held it over the narrow bone and through the swell of the lens managed to make out several rows of tiny scratches along the bone's edge, not unlike the fractions of an inch on a ruler, or the cross-hatching on Mr Sanderson's map.

‘What are they for?' I asked.

‘Decoration, maybe … Art of some sort. Who can say?'

I must admit I was a little taken aback by the Reverend's rather dismissive tone and, of course, he picked up on this straight away.

‘You'd be surprised, Your Grace, how that which we are in the habit of referring to as “historical fact” is often little more than speculation. A thousand years from now some chap might come across an ornament of our day. He might identify it as such in no time. But when he comes to decide what it is
for
, exactly … well, that is going to be guesswork, wouldn't you say?'

I conceded the point while privately vowing to give more thought to it later on. And like a truffling pig the Reverend went back to rooting in his drawers of bone. One specimen
after another was turned up and offered to me and while I examined one he was furiously digging out the next, so that my lap was soon heaped with them. All, the Reverend assured me, had once belonged to some creature who stalked the local countryside, many centuries ago. Bison, reindeer, mammoth, wild horse … they were beginning to weigh me down. As I shifted in my chair they ground against one another and made an eerie scraping noise but the Reverend was much too deeply immersed in the past to notice any discomfort I was presently suffering.

At some point I asked what tools he used to unearth these relics. ‘Oh, just a teaspoon and a small brush,' he told me, still foraging. ‘The cave floors are nothing but silt, you see? Perfect for preservation. But we would never have had an inkling what was down there if the farmer who used one of the caves to shelter his cattle hadn't tripped over a fossil or two.'

He stopped for a second, raised his head and peered over his drawers at me. ‘Have you not seen the caves since they were tidied-up, Your Grace?'

I told him that I had not and admitted being unable to recall ever having been right inside them, though I drive past them often enough.

‘And you being such an underground man,' he said. ‘Well, we must go. Yes, of course we must,' and he began nodding. ‘We must go this very minute.'

He paused for me to nod along with him. ‘How splendid. I shall show you round your own caves.'

He was now nodding his head so violently the two drawers in his lap had begun to bounce about. But all of a sudden he stopped and raised a finger, for us both to hold our horses. ‘Before we go,' he said gravely, ‘one final bone.'

And, with considerable care, he presented me with an almost circular piece of bone. Quite small, but heavy as a rock.

‘And who is this?' I asked the Reverend.

‘The woolly rhino,' he replied with evident pride. ‘Very rare.'

‘A rhino in Nottinghamshire?' I asked him.

He gave me his surest, wisest nod.

I was most impressed. ‘If you don't mind my asking, Reverend, how do you know it is a woolly rhino?'

He indicated a row of books. ‘It's all in there,' he said, and sighed a little, as if recalling every weary hour of reading, the many months spent with his head in a book. ‘But, you know, one must also employ a little bit of this,' and he tapped the side of his round head.

‘Naturally,' I said, less certain with every second just what it was we were talking about. ‘And in your opinion how might a woolly rhino actually look?'

‘Well, now …' The Reverend took his time chewing over this one. He gazed into the far distance, as if down all the centuries. ‘I would say he looks much the same as the modern rhino … but with a little more hair.'

I am sorry to admit that at this point my estimation of archaeologists plummeted somewhat. So much so that I wondered if, with the aid of the odd book or two, Mrs Pledger and I might not prove as proficient an archaeologist as Mellor himself.

It took us less than half an hour to trek across the fields to the caves, the Reverend setting an impressive pace. A strapped-up five-barred gate was the only thing that caused us any real delay.

The cave entrances are about fifty feet up a huge craggy slab and, from a distance, look like the gaps in an idiot's grin. We paused at the bottom of the sharp incline which leads up to them. The Reverend raised his nose and sniffed the air. ‘Chilly …' he said.

I was still considering this when he went charging off up the sandy slope, leaving a trail of dust behind. Well, there was little else to do but chase after him, so I set off at my own bow-legged trot. I soon caught him up on the incline and was becoming closely acquainted with his vast behind, having good reason, all of a sudden, to hope that his momentum did not suddenly give out on him.

We were both of us well wrapped-up in overcoats and our brief gallop generated a fair amount of heat, and when we had scrambled up the last of the steep path we sat ourselves down on a rocky ledge by the cave entrance to look down at the river below and try to recompose ourselves.

We were too breathless to make any conversation and the perspiration was still drying on my brow when the Reverend reached into his rucksack and brought out a small oil lamp.

‘Let us have a little look-see, shall we?' he said and placed the lamp on the ground between us. Then he produced from his waistcoat pocket a porcelain matchbox, in the shape of a cherub, whose head bent back on a hinge to reveal the matches hidden inside. Mellor took one out and struck it on the underside of the box.

‘Show us the way, young fellow,' he said, as the match burst into life.

We advanced down a damp, narrow passage which went straight into the rock. The second we had set foot in it I felt the temperature dramatically drop and every breath was immediately transformed into a shocking blast to the chest.

‘No wonder the bones keep so well,' I remarked to Mellor. ‘It is like an ice-house in here.'

With his lamp held out before him the Reverend led the way, our footfalls coming right back at us from the cold and stinking rock. We had covered hardly any distance when the tunnel began to shrink around us. A most unpleasant feeling. But we kept on, creeping deeper into the earth, one tentative
step after another, until Mellor's breadth prevented all but the faintest flicker coming back to light my way and I was forced to stumble in his dismal wake. In no time my hands were out in front of me, lest I be struck by some protruding rock, my fingers fussing over the stone around me – sometimes dry, sometimes greasy with moss. I was utterly lost in the darkness and bumbling along so clumsily that when Mellor suddenly stopped to catch his breath, I walked straight into him.

Our faltering journey had advanced maybe thirty yards in all when the tunnel's roof dropped by a couple more feet. Originally, it had cleared our heads by several inches but now pressed right down on top of us, so that we were obliged to walk bent-double in order to avoid cracking our heads. I found I kept looking keenly back over my shoulder, towards the entrance's ragged circle of light, each time noticing how it had diminished a little, until it was nothing more than a distant, fading sun.